Hello and welcome to the inaugural post of the newly rebuilt Team 980 build season blog.  Now for those of you who are familiar with robotics competitions, the team, and FIRST, bear with me because there will be some people reading this who have no idea what we are all about and need a little background.

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is an organization that allows students from elementary school through high school to build and compete with robots of their own creation.   Team 980 “ThunderBots” participates in the High School division of FIRST where the robots can be as big as some of the students and compete on a field bigger than most classrooms.  (The number 980 is our registration number within the high school division of FIRST.  More teams are identified by their number than their name.)  Our students have the opportunity to work with adult mentors from industry that advise and help the students build the robot they will be competing with.  There is a catch though, unlike industry robots that are developed over a matter of years, these students only get 6 weeks to build and test their robot before competition.  It’s intense, and a whole lot of fun!

Ok stop that thought right there.  I know you were all thinking it… BATTLEBOTS!  It’s on tv, on the internet, it looks exciting I know.  But that is not what we are trying to do here.  We are training the engineers of tomorrow.  We want to teach them to do more than install a giant sledge hammer on top of some wheels to face off against a robot with a flamethrower.  If you have seen it, the size of our robots can actually be bigger than the ones on tv, and our robots play games like basketball, soccer, even extreme frisbee.  What we focus on is teaching them principles of design, fabrication, electronics and programming.  Oh, and the kids do all the work!  The mentors are only there to advise, guide and teach the students how to make their ideas work.

After hearing all of that, if you’re still interested, and if you made it this far in the post you probably are, here is what you will be seeing here.  As we are currently in our 6 week build season, Team members will be giving little reports on what they are doing on our current robot design and why.  They will talk about their progress and give all of you readers a little insight into the engineering that goes on in a robotics team buildspace.  After the 6 weeks are over, you will hear about what we are doing to prepare for competition.  Beyond that point we will continue throughout the year with posts about off season activities.

So keep watch here, our next post will probably be January 16, the middle of week 2 of our build season. We are looking forward to a really fun build season and are happy to bring all of you along for the ride.

– Alex (Controls Mentor for FRC Team 980 ThunderBots)

As of Week 2, Team 980 has developed its strategy for this year’s game, FIRST Power Up. Our robot will need to deliver cubes quickly (including in autonomous mode) and be able to climb during the end game. Our design team is creating the robot in SolidWorks, has completed the drivetrain/chassis and is drawing the cube forklift. The controls team has developed the vision-targeting code and has demonstrated autonomous modes on our prototyping robot. Team 980’s business team is preparing submissions for the Chairman’s and Entrepreneurship awards. We are making great progress in these areas in preparation for our first regional competition in March. Our goal is to bring home some blue banners this year and attend the FIRST Championships in April.